Abstract
The aim of the study was to investigate how the biological binding between different facial dimensions, and their social and communicative relevance, may impact updating processes in working memory (WM). We focused on WM updating because it plays a key role in ongoing processing. Gaze direction and facial expression are crucial and changeable components of face processing. Direct gaze enhances the processing of approach-oriented facial emotional expressions (e.g., joy), while averted gaze enhances the processing of avoidance-oriented facial emotional expressions (e.g., fear). Thus, the way in which these two facial dimensions are combined communicates to the observer important behavioral and social information. Updating of these two facial dimensions and their bindings has not been investigated before, despite the fact that they provide a piece of social information essential for building and maintaining an internal ongoing representation of our social environment. In Experiment 1 we created a task in which the binding between gaze direction and facial expression was manipulated: high binding conditions (e.g., joy-direct gaze) were compared to low binding conditions (e.g., joy-averted gaze). Participants had to study and update continuously a number of faces, displaying different bindings between the two dimensions. In Experiment 2 we tested whether updating was affected by the social and communicative value of the facial dimension binding; to this end, we manipulated bindings between eye and hair color, two less communicative facial dimensions. Two new results emerged. First, faster response times were found in updating combinations of facial dimensions highly bound together. Second, our data showed that the ease of the ongoing updating processing varied depending on the communicative meaning of the binding that had to be updated. The results are discussed with reference to the role of WM updating in social cognition and appraisal processes.
Highlights
Gaze direction and facial expression are crucial components of face processing, because they communicate the intentions of others, and, in general, being able to read the mind from the face is important for social interaction but is advantageous for navigating in a social environment
GENERAL DISCUSSION The present study is original in terms of bringing together two distinct areas of research: working memory (WM) updating and the perception of faces, in particular the processing of biological binding between facial dimensions
It provides an initial answer as to how the bindings between facial dimensions that have an important social and communicative value are updated; a function of WM that is important for guiding our social behavior
Summary
Gaze direction and facial expression are crucial components of face processing, because they communicate the intentions of others, and, in general, being able to read the mind from the face is important for social interaction but is advantageous for navigating in a social environment. Facial expression and gaze direction are associated to signal these basic behavioral tendencies and their processing appears to be combined. Appraisal theories of emotion (e.g., N’Diyae et al, 2009; Mumenthaler and Sander, 2012) emphasize the fact that the combination of gaze direction and facial expression indicates to the perceiver the degree of self-relevance of the seen face. For survival, the self-relevance of a threat signaled by a fearful face should increase when the face is looking at something away from the observer. This is because the averted gaze signals where in the environment a threat may come from. The appraisal of the face provides important social information to be processed and to be taken into account
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